Counting Down Through Darkness Into Light
by greenschist
Summary: Drabble collection, multiple characters, set 7th year. Chapter 5: Sometimes it's better to want than it is to receive. It's a lesson Blaise already learned at home; the new and improved Hogwarts is just reinforcing it.
1. Hannah

Note: Written for **Lost In the Lies**' "Ten to One" challenge on HPFC: ten drabbles, each focused on an individual character, and then one one-shot containing them all. I'm choosing to do all of mine set during 7th year.

Disclaimer: JKR's, not mine.

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_Hannah  
__prompt: past_

Hannah endures Muggle Studies by thinking about her mother's family.

Her mother was Muggle-born, and she never washed dishes with magic; she said it didn't clean them properly.

Her grandmother was Muggle, and she did all her baking from scratch; she said she only trusted the quality if she made it herself.

Her great-grandmother raised four children on a seamstress' salary and never accepted help from anyone; she said it wouldn't feel right when there were others in greater need.

Poison drips from Carrow's tongue—calling Muggles and Muggle-born _filthy…lazy… weak…vile_—and Hannah holds her memories in her heart and lifts her head high.


	2. Padma

Disclaimer: JKR's, not mine.

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_Padma  
__prompt: pure_

"Just keep your head down," her auntie urged when mandatory attendance at Hogwarts was declared. "They should not bother you."

The reason goes unsaid. They're _pure_…no Muggle branches in the family tree, no pro-Muggle alliances like the Weasleys. The Patils are carefully, pointedly, deliberately neutral.

It isn't until she boards the train and sees so many empty spaces where Muggle-born students used to sit that Padma understands the real harm neutrality can do. She sits with Parvati and Lavender, their heads bowed and hands clasped, as Death Eaters stalk the aisles, looking for Potter. He's not there, of course he's not there, and just knowing that makes Padma want to cry. If Harry Potter is the Chosen One, the only one who can fight You-Know-Who, then what will happen to them all without him there? She's not even at Hogwarts yet, and her powerlessness is suffocating.

They huddle, staring at the floor between their feet.


	3. Justin

Disclaimer: JKR's, not mine

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_Justin  
prompt: caught_

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His suitcase—not a trunk, not anymore—bumps against his leg as he shuffles behind his parents. They have a plane to catch, one that will take them to the relative safety of France.

He tries not to think about the wand wrapped in socks at the bottom of his case or about friends boarding the train for a school now denied him. He tries not to listen when his father mutters, "Could've gone to Eton. If only he'd been born norm—"

He bites his tongue, but Justin understands. He can't even be angry. They're caught in the same trap, Muggle parents and wizard son alike. What has magic brought them in the end but grief?


	4. Pomona

Disclaimer: JKR's, not mine.

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_Professor Sprout_

_prompt: run away_

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Even the greenhouses are not safe anymore, and that is enough to break her heart.

She tries not to wince as Amycus Carrow kicks over flowerpots and spits into her carefully prepped beds. Even the little seedlings seem to tremble, as if sensing his heavy boots and the pleasure he finds in destroying anything beautiful.

Pomona almost wishes she could run away. But there's nowhere to go and, even if there was, her students need her, just as her plants do. She ignores Carrow and kneels in the rich soil to bind a bent stalk to a stake, to keep it stable until it has the strength to stand on its own again.


	5. Blaise

_Blaise  
__prompt: bittersweet_

Blaise doesn't remember his father or his first two stepfathers, but he remembers the third. He was a squat, thick-muscled man with rings on his fingers and whiskey on his breath. One night, when he had spotted Blaise spying down on him from the floor above, he shouted that Blaise was the son of a whore and that the day he met Blaise's mum was the worst day of his life.

When he was suddenly, mysteriously, and accidently killed two weeks later, Blaise was glad.

His fifth stepfather was his favorite by far. Edward was an awkward man, scrawny and full of useless trivia, but willing to spend time with Blaise, not just his mum. From him, Blaise learned that twenty percent of a hummingbird's weight is its heart and that Woldolf the Well-Preserved, a 3rd-century Minister of Magic, was so vain that he almost bankrupted the Ministry by filling it with costly mirrors.

Blaise liked Edward, liked the way he would wrap an arm around his shoulders and give him a hug before he went to bed, and the way he would go into the garden with him sometimes and toss a Quaffle back and forth after dinner, like a real dad. So when his mother began spending her evenings out again, and Edward began to spend hours staring out the window with a look of misery on his face, Blaise tried to help for the first time in his life.

"Buy her something nice," he suggested, but his mother already had all the jewels and designer robes her closets and drawers could hold.

"Take her somewhere," was his next idea, but his mother would prefer to spend her time with her friends and new boyfriend than with her husband.

"Tell her you love her." As lame as it sounded, Blaise knew from flipping through his mother's collection of romances that hearing that sort of thing was important to women. But Edward just smiled a sad smile and rested his hand on Blaise's head.

"You're a good boy, Blaise." And he had flushed with pleasure to be told that, even as he felt a weird ache in his chest.

A few weeks later, after giving him his nightly hug, Edward looked him in the eye and told him, "Sometimes getting what you think you want isn't as wonderful as wanting it was." Blaise had not understood. Finally getting what he wanted—whether a new training broom, a crup, or a Little Wizard Potions Lab—was infinitely better than the whinging and begging he had to do first. He puzzled over his stepfather's words until he fell asleep.

When Edward was found the next morning, suddenly, mysteriously, and accidently dead, Blaise cried for the first time in years. And when his mother married his sixth stepfather the day after Edward's estate was settled, he cried again, for the last time.

It is not until two stepfathers later, when he returns to the new, improved, Mudblood-free Hogwarts for his seventh year, that he thinks understands what Edward was trying to tell him about wanting and getting. This is what he and the other Slytherins have always wanted: Hogwarts purified, the dirty bloods cast out, and the blood traitors cast down. It should be the dawn of a new Golden Age.

So why, he wonders, looking around at the bent heads and bruises left in the Carrows' wake, does it suck so bad?

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_AN: Longer than the drabble I intended, but I enjoy playing with Blaise and his black widow mum too much._


End file.
